The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[robert@fm]

I read somewhere that sudoku as we know it was invented by an American puzzle magazine in the early 1970s.  Nikoli (much) later got hold of it and gave it its present name, plus the rules that a puzzle should be symmetrical and should have no more than 30 clue numbers.

Does anyone remember coming across a sudoku, or sudoku-like puzzle, earlier than the 1970s?  The earliest one I can remember was in the Second Pan Book of Puzzles ca. 1966, the last-but-one of which listed 7 straight trominoes and 2 dominoes, about whose squares 5 each of the colours red, yellow, green, blue and white had been distributed; the objective of course being to assemble them into a 5x5 square in which each colour appeared once in every row and column. I finally solved it some 20 years later, by using my ZX-Spectrum computer to do a tree search of the puzzle's space; of course, by then I'd long since lost the book.

[MCC]

Maybe you like to check out this link.

MCC

[robert@fm]

Thanks for that link -- interesting indeed.

One of the things I found particularly interesting in that thread was a link to a page by David Singmaster, who 25 years ago wrote a famous treatise on the Rubik's Cube; and this page partially answers a question I have, in that it shows that as recently as ten years ago, Singmaster was still at the South Bank University (as it is now)...